Prosecution lawyers defend new regime

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Our correspondent visits a police station to see how the CPS charging system is working

POLICE stations have descended into “chaos” and criminals have been left to “roam the streets”, according to recent reports from defence solicitors in the legal press.

There isn’t much anarchy at Gravesend police station in North Kent, as Peter Swain, a Crown Prosecution Service lawyer, defends the biggest cultural shift in the prosecution of criminal offences since the CPS was set up in 1986. “If you think logically, wasn’t it crazy that there would be prosecutions without going to a prosecutor first?” he asks. “It’s a nonsense that a large proportion of cases start, go to court, solicitors get paid